New Born
by Arevhat
Summary: He's thinner than she is, starved in ways she knows but cannot name. Pre-Premiere Chiana and Nerri.


Disclaimer: Farscape and its characters belong to The Jim Henson Company, and not to me.

Setting: About a cycle and a half before Durka Returns. No spoilers but I play with characters seen and referenced in Home On The Remains.

Rating & Warnings: R. Dark themes of a sexual nature - incest, prostitution. Vague slash. Nothing is graphic, but it's there. Farscapian profanity.

Beta: Oleg. Thank you so much for listening, and for your encouragement.

Author's Notes: While I'm not the first (or even second or third) author to sometimes see the Chi/Nerri dynamic from this angle, this is my very first Farscape fic and I haven't finished or posted fiction of any sort since June '06...to say I'm nervous about its reception, and about writing again, is an understatement of astronomical proportions. A little kindness would mean so much.

NEW BORN

The scripture has been torn from its binding and the brittle pages mutilated, laid purposely - artfully - across B'Sogg's couch like shattered bone.

Chiana howls, a wild thing, and hurls herself at Desdi, little more than teeth and claws. Des bites back, fights back. Miners whistle and jeer as they scrabble in the dirt; their violence gives the men a small, crude thrill.

Desdi is older, harder. More focused. She pins Chiana under her knees and hits her in the mouth. Chiana spits, rips at the dark plaits that brush against her skin; her fist connects with Desdi's eye and then a stranger is pulling Des off and Chi up, wedging her own sturdy body between them. She holds the girls at arm's length and shakes them when they hiss and kick.

"No man is worth this," the big woman says and tosses her head at B'Sogg. "Especially not that one."

"Not, not about a _man_." Chiana's eyes are black holes. She moans, incoherent. "She, she, she –"

"_She, she, she,_" Desdi mocks. She presses a hand to her own eye, bruised amber and bronze. "Let me be, Altana. B'Sogg can have the whore."

"Go on with you then," the woman - Altana - says, and pushes Desdi in the direction of the mines. Des turns on her heel and blows Chiana a kiss; there's laughter as she elbows through the wall of men.

Chiana expects a push of her own, toward the smug B'Sogg. Instead Altana takes her by the hand. "Come with me, girl," she says. "You look a mess."

With its beaded curtains and knurled salt lamps, Altana's shelter stirs up a mostly forgotten monen spent in a Traskan commune, smashed on heart-shaped pills. Nerri would have been content to die there, pure and weightless; but Chiana had been frightened by the doors opening in her mind and their whispered promises, frightened she would no longer exist without her scars.

Some of Altana's own scars are visible, crisscrossing her cheeks and forehead and most of her body, the legacy of a possessive husband. "I drove him to drink and the spirits made him do it," she'll tell Chiana one night, their heads bowed over spirits of their own while Temmon and Nerri play tubrui, their raucous laughter carrying across the bar, punctuating the confession. He couldn't help himself, no more than she had been able to help the strychnine in his soup. The scar left by their small, smiling son - now buried for more than twenty cycles - nearly cleaves her in two.

Altana sits Chiana next to the fire and rummages for a clean cloth. "Desdi Girl is a sharp one," Altana says, and wets what she finds with her tongue. She dabs it against Chi's bloody lip and the scratches on her throat, the fabric staining a pale, mottled blue. "She and B'Sogg play their games but she knows how to work more than him. Little girls need to be realistic, no matter how pretty they are."

Chiana closes her eyes, slows her breath. She likes the rhythm of Altana's voice, her calloused touch, the way her ministrations make her mouth hurt more. She tilts her head and darts her tongue against her split lip until the stinging becomes a pulse. A heartbeat.

Desdi's heart had felt like this, beneath her lips and hands and greedy, fervent tongue. A relentless throb, so different from Chiana's own restless flutter. "Be still, _choux_," Desdi would say as she traced the fine line of a collarbone, a hip, a shoulder blade; as she tasted the charcoals and pale, smokey hollows of Chiana's body.

Chiana has been with women before, but never without men there - directing, playing with their dolls. Alone with Des, arched against her mouth, Chi had felt like a real girl.

The discovery that his playthings would frell each other without his permission had unnerved B'Sogg, bruised his ego and wilted his dick. "You are a treacherous bitch, Desdi Girl," he said as he tossed her out. "I want no part of you."

"It'll be easy, B'Sogg," Desdi said, eyes flashing, "learning to frell yourself." She had gripped Chiana by the wrist and pulled her to her, too hard, too close; and suddenly Chiana had wanted no part of her either. She won't be claimed by anyone, not even beautiful, fearless Des, not even if Nerri will think she's been frelling around, frelling up his con.

Chiana had twisted free, stretched herself across B'Sogg's couch, lithe and white against the crimson. Indifferent to the way Desdi's smile broke.

B'Sogg may be cruel; but he is also the Boss of the Budong and Chiana can tell he hasn't had his fill of her yet. B'Sogg is a rich man who wants to be richer and there is no better mark. Desdi is a brilliant frell but she has nothing else to offer and she means nothing to Chiana.

It's only now that Chiana understands she meant something to Desdi. It's curious, unwanted. She opens her eyes and shakes wintry, matted hair out of her face, folds one leg beneath her.

"How old are you, girl?" Altana produces an ancient bottle from beneath her bed and pours two shots. "Sixteen?"

Eighteen. Almost. Chiana sniffs the liquor; it's saccharine, disgusting. Flecks of cork float on the surface. She pours it down her throat without swallowing and crooks a shoulder. "Old enough."

"I see," Altana smiles. "Realistic."

Nerri pushes into the shelter and drops to his knees beside Chiana. His anger washes over her, heavy and cold, as he pulls handfuls of torn paper from his pockets and throws them on the ground and into the fire. The little book of Nebari scripture - forbidden history, forgotten hope - has become no more than a talisman, carelessly carried. It shouldn't hurt this much.

He says, "Was it worth it, little sister?"

Chiana wants to say yes. She wants to see if he'll hit her too, if his fury will feel like Desdi's; but the word hitches in her throat and comes out a sob.

Altana, perturbed by so little, has no stomach for family quarrels. "Don't be too hard on each other," she tells them as she leaves. "No one will ever love you as well."

Nerri puts his hand on the back of Chiana's neck, gently at first, his fingers catching in her hair, then with mounting pressure as he forces her look at what's left of their past. The fire has snared most of the pieces; they skip and swirl in the heat, devoured from the inside out. Chiana reaches for the embers and they crumble against her palms like stigmata.

Nerri yanks her back by her neck, by her wrists. She tries to twist away but he crushes her to his chest and holds her there until she stops struggling. His heartbeat feels just like her own. "I hate you," Chiana says as she clings to him, her tears soaking his shirt. "I frelling hate you."

He says, "I know."

He buries his face in her hair, unable to hold both her and his anger, and searches for something deep in his memory. "Save and keep safe," he murmurs and she quiets. "Keep me for now, so I do not fall. Keep me for always, for the sea is so wide and my boat is so small."

It's a child's prayer, an unwritten prayer. It won't burn like the rest. Chiana shifts in his arms and says, without accusation, "Sometimes you miss Nebari."

Sometimes; but the Nebari he misses no longer exists, if it ever did. He runs his thumb over her lips, lingering on the wound. When he kisses her, soft and wet, her blood blooms in his mouth. "You're my home, Chiana. For always."

She kneels beside him, clasps her hands together and raises them to the sky; breathes a rite for the dead in a dead language. Nerri bows his head as he feeds the remains to the fire and Chiana's voice becomes their mother's, the lilting incantation a song. Naia is singing as she washes her hair and annoints it with bassim oil, her voice drifting from the open door. Nerri, seven cycles old, stands in the garden in his nightshirt, the blue-black grass beneath his feet still warm from the sun. Chiana is four and baby-fat; she shrieks with delight as he places a flickering pyridae in her cupped hands. The light seeping from between her fingers entrances her for a moment, then she shrieks again and lets it fly.

"It's bedtime for bugs," Naia sings and scoops Chiana up as she runs past in pursuit of the pyridae. She takes his hand in hers as they go inside; but he knows he'll be allowed to burrow under the blankets and read by torchlight until he falls asleep, lulled by the soft, secretive sounds of her and her consort. It won't be their father tonight. She never sings when it's their father.

"Do you think she dreams about us?" Chiana asks, and he's back on the budong. She's so small and sad and he doesn't know what she wants to hear. All these cycles on their own - in Nebari slums, on alien worlds and ships and corpses - and this is the first time she has ever spoken of the mother that was taken from them. Cleansed.

"No," Nerri says. It's what he wants to hear. The alternative horrifies him. "She's gone, Chiana. Someplace else, someplace better."

"I wish we were someplace better," Chiana says, but her voice is lighter than it was a microt ago. He clasps an arm around her hips, his hand warm and chaste against the lifedisc that breathes beneath her skin and she angles her head against the sharp edge of his shoulder. He's thinner than she is, starved in ways she knows but cannot name. "This place is a drenhole."

"We've been in worse drenholes," Nerri says. Chiana remembers, but she prefers not to.

There's a rustle of beads and Tara fixes them from the door with apologetic eyes. She's Sebacean, golden, sweet as ripe prowsa fruit. Her infatuation with Nerri is pitiful and transparent to everyone but him; if Chiana could she would tell the nixar that Nerri will frell anyone for money, his sister alone to keep breathing, and no one for love. It would be a kindness.

"B'Sogg wants you dealing Deemo, Nerri," Tara says, winding a gossamer strand of her hair around a finger. "He says you're costing him."

Nerri's dark eyes glitter, his mouth quirks. He's taught B'Sogg how to skim from the table and launder the books, but kept the best tricks to himself. Another monen and they'll be flush. Another monen and he'll be able to take Chiana someplace better. Someplace beautiful.

Chiana stops him as he rises, her head tilted back, bruised mouth open and trusting. She lays her hand against her heart, the one he carries inside him. Her brother, her lover, her protector, her everything.

"I love you, Nerri," she says. "For always."

_Link it to the world_

_Link it to yourself_

_Stretch it like a birth squeeze_

_The love for what you hide_

_The bitterness inside_

_Is growing like the new born_

_When you've seen, seen_

_Too much,_

_Too young, young_

_Soulless is everywhere_

_Hopeless time to roam_

_The distance to your home_

_Fades away to nowhere_

_- Muse_


End file.
